Grammar schools are back on the agenda. Elizabeth Grice meets Nigel Fanshawe,
an inspirational headmaster and a passionate defender of the grammar’s
inclusive qualities
.

Nigel Fanshawe, headmaster extraordinary, is a cautiously happy man as he approaches his 100th birthday. The first signs that the Government may allow grammar schools to expand to meet the pressure on waiting lists is the most cheering thing he has heard in his long, productive retirement.

“It always seemed strange to me that we should have selection in sport and in music but not in brains,” he says. “Now things look a lot more promising.” In a significant about-turn, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has suggested that existing grammars should be able to grow and even to run “satellite” schools that are also selective. Though David Cameron once said it would be “an electoral albatross” to pledge to build more grammars, Fanshawe, headmaster of the King Edward Grammar School, Chelmsford, for 28 years until 1977, has never given up hope of a renaissance.

“If there is a chance of reviving them,” he says, “we have to know why it went wrong the first time. The real cause of disillusionment was the shortage of places. The government should have been building grammar schools like mad. Next time, there should be plenty of places so that every child who reaches the standard, gets in.

“Grammar schools are said to divide the rich from the poor,” Fanshawe says. “but that is exactly what they don’t do. I had no catchment area. All I cared about was how an applicant did in the exam papers, not whether his father was a barrister or a farm labourer. One boy’s father was a cowman. He got a first at Cambridge and is now an academic. Is that social divide? Total rubbish. Politicians need to recognise the facts.”

League tables show that most of the country’s top 100 schools are grammars. There are up to 13 applications for every place at the most popular of England’s remaining 164 grammar schools. (The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 ruled that no new grammars are allowed to be created.)

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Competition is so great that parents either pay for their children to be coached for the 11-plus, or send them to fee-paying prep schools. This, argues Fanshawe, is against the grammar school ethos. “The few grammars that are left are selective in a way that was never intended.”

Inspirational but severe, Fanshawe was one of those idiosyncratic figures education has done its best to squeeze out. Not many people would recognise his name. He won no awards. But he took over a depleted, ill-disciplined school that was ravaged by wartime neglect and transformed it into one of the most successful in the country.

“He was a distant figure in a gown, but heroic to me,” says one of his past pupils. “He had an aura about him. On my first day at school, addressing 90 new boys in the school hall, he told us we could go as far as we wanted, we could be leaders. You were encouraged to be yourself.”

Normal retirement age meant nothing to Fanshawe. Having been persuaded to do extra time, he finally left KEGS in 1977, aged 67, but became so bored that he took up part-time maths teaching at St Paul’s School for Girls in London for a further nine years. “I assured the headmistress that I was quite safe with her girls because I had reached the age of discretion. I had never taught girls. It was an eye-opener. They are lovely to teach,” he says.

When the introduction of the National Curriculum quenched Fanshawe’s enthusiasm for teaching, he embarked on a new life of research. “After I retired,” he says, “I thought it was about time I educated myself. I was a simpleton.”

First, he turned his mathematician’s brain to the subject of the bubonic plague. How was it, he wondered, that a devastatingly infectious disease with an incubation period of 30 days did not fell the crews of the ships that harboured the supposedly plague-carrying rats, yet the men unloading cargo on the quaysides were dying like flies? Painstakingly, he disproved the popular myth that rats were responsible for the Black Death and eventually his findings were borne out by other researchers.

“Whatever it was, it was not bubonic plague,” he says. “It was not bacterial. It was a viral disease. Nothing to do with rats at all. And if it did come again, we would be just as defenceless against it as our forebears were.”

Until recently, Fanshawe was living independently. The sitting room of his home in Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, harboured a headmasterly clutter of reference works, biographies and papers. When we met, he was dressed nattily in a sage corduroy waistcoat, check trousers and a cream polo-neck. He keeps his brain active by solving puzzles, and reading biographies and histories.

He spent his boyhood in Wolverhampton, where his father ran a recycling business. With six children, they were always hard-pressed for cash. Fanshawe lived on his wits, gaining a scholarship to grammar school (where he jumped straight from the first to the fourth year) and then collecting four scholarships to make up the £235 a year he needed to go to Cambridge to read maths. He graduated in 1932 with a first, earning the accolade of Wrangler.

At Radley College public school he taught boys with all the privileges he lacked and ran the school cadet force. “Some were not used to the idea of work and when I asked them what they would go on to do, they said they would go back to the family estate and do a bit of hunting. I was never resentful,” Fanshawe says.

Bad eyesight prevented him from joining up in 1939, so he had a pleasant war, teaching by day and patrolling the Thames in a launch as an officer of the Home Guard at night. “Our job was to watch for landing German parachutists,” he says. “I had a short stick and a .22 small-bore rifle. Those were our weapons. In summer, the 3am to 6am patrol was very quiet. We just saw the occasional heron. It was absolutely lovely.”

On a climbing holiday in the Austrian mountains, he met a statuesque blonde called Maria. “Her father was a master shoemaker and Maria ran one of his shops. I went in for a replacement shoelace. She spoke English, and that made me slightly attractive to her. I had no German at all.”

On the next school holiday, he returned to Austria and proposed. To the boys at Radley and later at Eton, where Fanshawe was an assistant master, Maria Fanshawe was an exotic creature, vividly remembered for her alluring accent and verve. She entered into the social life of both public schools with enthusiasm.

“In my own department at Radley,” he says, “I was a little dictator. It was my job and I did it as I liked. Now you have to stick to the National Curriculum and teachers are sent on courses that are a total waste of time.”

In 1949, when Fanshawe started his headship at KEGS, corporal punishment was the norm. “The cane has to be used with proper discrimination,” he says. “There is no doubt of its efficacy. In the early days, I did cane a bit to create the idea that there are some things – smoking, refusing to do what a teacher requests — that you just don’t do. In only a few years, the caning rate went down to almost zero.”

“You had to be evil to get caned,” recalls a KEGS old boy from the 1971 intake. “There were few thrashings. His method was to invite you in for a chat; it was not a pleasant experience.”

Fanshawe took boys from wherever they lived, as long as they passed the rigorous selection exam – no matter what their background. One boy came from 40 miles away. When Essex County Council purged 120 of its grammars in the Sixties, KEGS was spared because a 1550 document by its founders, stipulating that the school was to be run by four governors and their successors, had never been revoked.

“They worked very hard to turn my school comprehensive,” Fanshawe says, “but that document saved us. Now there are four surviving grammars in the county and 10 applicants for each place.”

At 96, he was still driving his 1989 Mazda and was an active member of the indoor bowls club. A typical day started at 6.45am when he would make porridge, listen to the radio and read the papers.

Since Maria died, he has found solace in his books and his Beethoven collection. He has two daughters, both retired teachers, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Fanshawe regards the education system with a mixture of despair and anger. He believes the lack of good-quality graduates going into teaching is wrecking the system. “Governments have, for 20 years, been attacking the teaching profession, with the result that it is no longer attractive,” he says. “Teachers don’t want to spend their lives fighting 13-year-olds who couldn’t care less about education. It’s no fun. It was fun to me. None of the brightest graduates wants to go into teaching and that means comprehensives can never have the best staff at the top.”